IsomeTRICK Moves: Simple Transformation Animation in Adobe After Effects

1. Class Intro: Hey, guys, my name is Parson. I'm a graphic designer, Illustrator and top teacher here on Skillshare. In this Isometric Moves mini class, we will animate a cool transformation machine using Adobe After Effects. You'll have access to a customizable Adobe Illustrator file so you can get animating right away. Your first job is to select the objects that you will animate using the Illustrator file, or you can illustrate your own. The animation you'll make has many moving parts that you will animate in various ways. So there's lots to learn from creating your class project. By the end of this short mini class, you'll learn how to use track mats, parent layers, adjust the position and opacity properties, as well as use simple effects. By the end of this class, you'll also learn how to set up your animation for loops. This class is perfect for those who have taken my isometric moves anyone can animate in Adobe After Effects class, where you get the foundational knowledge to understand Adobe After Effects to complete your class projects. By using the skills learned in that class and the ones you will learn in this class, you can complete your class project today so that you can add to your motion graphic portfolio. By the end of this class, you'll have your very own animation to share on Skillshare or with the world. I'll see you in class. 2. Setting Up Illustrator File for Animation: Welcome to the first class where we will go over how to set up your Illustrator file for animation. So I opened up the transformation machine.ai file, and here you can see that there's a variety of layers that we will use in our animation, and we have one artboard. Just note that anything that is within your artboard will be transferred over to After Effects, and you can use that for animation. So let's look at the layers individually. So first, we have a frame layer that just to show where you could frame off your animation. And then we have a reference blend reference where we will position our end objects in our blend so that they keep a consistent spacing. We have a blinking object that we can animate. We have our in objects. We have our in mask that we will mask our objects that will travel into the machine, and then we have our out objects down here that will travel out of the machine, and you can see a variety there. We have bubbles for the top part. We have the screen icons down here that you can interchange, and we have the out mask and the shadow, the background, and of course, the machine itself. All right. So the things that we're going to change in this illustration are the in objects and the out objects, and we can also change the screen icon. So how can we do that? So I have a sad face and a happy face, but maybe I want to change those things. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to unlock my in object layer and I'm going to select something. Maybe I want the noodles. I'm going to copy the noodles. I'm going to go over to my in object. As you can see, it's selected there. I'll just move this over so we can see everything. I'm going to double click into this blend. Now, I have the blend open here, and you can see in my layers that it is the blend. I'm going to delete the two objects that are actually in there. So I'll select the object itself. Don't select the blend line, and I'm going to paste in my new objects. So I have a noodle bowl. I'm place the first one within the circle or the reference point, and then I'm going to paste a second one. And as you can see, it takes over that original blend, and I'll place it within the reference point of number two. And then I'll double click out, and you can see that I have the noodles traveling from one side to the other, and they will go directly through the in point. Now I'm going to do the same thing with my out object. I'll lock my in object. I'll unlock my out object. I'm going to select the noodles will transition and they will turn into a cloud. All right. So I'm going to turn the noodles into a cloud. So I'm going to select my out object. I'm going to double click into the blend. As you can see, this is my out object. I'm going to delete the first two objects that I have in there, and I'm going to paste in the cloud, and maybe I'll make it a little bigger. And then I'll just copy that one, and I'll copy it and paste it. And as you can see, the blend has been created there. And I'll paste it over top of my reference for the last line. And now you can see that behind it, it perfectly matches up with the ingoing blend, so that when we animate them, we will animate them together and they will move at the same speed. All right. So we'll double click out of that. And then we'll change the icons as well. So down here, we can just open up our icon layer, unlock our icon layer, and then we can just move out those two. We can take the cloud and take the noodle bowl, put those there. I'm going to select these three objects, one, two, and three, holding control shift. I'm going to copy them. I'm going to go up to my illustration. I'm going to delete these three, and I will paste and move into place and just resize to fit them within that screen. All right, so I have noodles transitioning into a cloud, and I have my noodle bowl in my cloud going out. I have my masks set up. I can lock everything, and I will save it. All right. Now we can jump into After Effects and start animating our transformation machine. 3. Getting Started in After Effects: Three Okay, now that we have After Effects open, we're going to set up our file for animation. We're going to right click into the project panel, import file. We'll find our Illustrator file. We'll set it up as create composition, and we'll import. Now, we'll have the composition set like this and set for layer sizes and hit Okay. Now you can see that two compositions were made, one composition with everything contained in it, and then the main composition with all our layers. If we double click into that, you can see that we have all our layers here. Now we can see that we can hide our layers using the eye at the side so we can reveal it or hide it. And with the frame, this is going to be our final composition size. So anything that's within this frame is going to be shown in our animation. So that's important to see. And now, what we're going to do is we're going to clean up our timeline a little bit using something called the Shi Gui. So if you see here, there's a little little face here. And to activate these is you can click on this, and what it's going to do is it's going to hide that layer from your timeline. It's not going to get rid of it, but it'll hide it temporarily so it's not visible. So you get rid of a lot of the clutter. So you can click on that, and what you can do is you can click on the button here and that'll hide that layer from your timeline. So we'll go back into it and we'll decide which layers we want to see in our timeline that we will animate or use for animation and what we don't need to see. So the background layer and the shadow layer, we don't need to we're not going to touch them. We're not going to touch the machine layer. And we're not going to touch the blend reference layer. And actually, we can just hide that one, as well. And any layers that you're shy guy, it might be good to just lock them as well, just so you don't accidentally touch them when you're playing around with your animation. Now, if I were to click the main shy guy, it'll get rid of those layers from my timeline, and, yeah, it looks a little better. So now we have everything cleaned up and we can get ready for animation. 4. Animating Your Objects: Okay. Now we'll get into our animation. We have our composition window over here. We can see all the visual elements, and then we have our timeline here where we will actually do our animation. So I'll zoom in a little bit to show you what we're doing. And now, what we want to do is we want to create it, so these objects, the in objects are moving into the machine and the out objects are moving out. Now, how we're going to do that is we're going to just select the in object. And as you can see here, we have it selected in our timeline. Before we do that, we just want to set the timing of our composition. So to set your timing, I'm going to go to composition settings, and I will change the time down here, and I'll keep it as 4 seconds. If yours is not 4 seconds, you can change it to 4 seconds to keep it consistent with what I'm doing here or you can change it to whatever duration you want. I'll hit Okay. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to go to the beginning of our timeline, and we're going to hit P on our keyboard to activate the position property. Now, we're going to hit the stopwatch over here to set the first keyframe for that property. Now, what I'm going to do is I want to move my first object over to this second object, so it'll move from one spot to another. And then I'm going to loop that animation so it looks like it's continually moving through the machine within our composition window. Now, how I'm going to do that is I'm going to control D while this in object is selected, and it creates a duplicate. I'm going to hit T on my keyboard, which opens up the opacity. I'm going to reduce the opacity to about 50%. Now, I'm going to go back to my first in object. I'll zoom in here. I'm going to go in my timeline, first of all, and I'm going to go over 20 frames. So I'm going to hit Shift page down to go over 20 frames. I'm going to hit that twice, and it goes over 20 frames. And now I'm going to take that layer. I'm going to pull it and drag it over top of my other nutable layer. I'm going to try and match it up so you can't see it anymore, and it's perfectly aligned with the second one. Now, if I go back and forth, you can see there's an animation from one to the other, one to the other. Looks pretty cool. Now I can get rid of my in object two. And now, what I'm going to do with this one, I'm going to create this animation as a loop. I'm going to hold Alter option on my keyboard. I'm going to select the stopwatch, and it opens up the expression window. I'm going to type in the expression loop out, and I'm just going to hit Enter. So now I have my loop out expression applied to these two key frames. And what it's going to do, it's going to repeat these two key frames over and over again. Let's see how that works. Boom, boom, boom. Now, you can see that it sort of just reveals itself here. But if we look within, sorry, if we look within our window here, where we will actually see our animation, it looks like it's continually moving forward, which is really cool. Now, we want the second object, the out object to match perfectly with the first object. So we're going to parent the layers together. So we have our out object down here, and we have this Pick Whip. Now, this pick whip, it allows you to parent one object to another. So it'll take all the properties of the parent object and apply it to this object. So we're going to click on that, and you can see when I pull it this little line comes here. If I hover over in object one, it's going to take the properties of in object one and apply it to the out object. And I'm going to see how it's working. You can see the cloud sort of moving at the same rate as the noodle bolls, and the expression is also applied to it. Now I want to hide, you know, the second half of the in object and the first half of the out object using masks. So I'm going to go to my in Object. I'm going to try to find my Track mat options. You might have to toggle. There might be a toggle down here if you can't see it and find the track mat. I'm going to go to my in Object track mat and go to in mask. Okay? That hides everything after that. It contained within that mask, and I'm going to go do my out object, Matt, and I'm going to do out mask, as you can see here. Now, if I just zoom in slightly and I hit space on my keyboard to play, wow, look at that. Now we have a transformation from noodles to a cloud, which is really cool. All right. And then it perfectly loops at the four second mark back to the beginning. Great. All right. I'm just going to save it there, and we will continue our animation process in the next lesson. 5. Animating the Blink: Now, to give our animation a little more character, as the objects are passing through, we're going to make the red light blink. So how we're going to do that is we're going to duplicate the blinker layer, and we're going to do that doing Control or Command D with it selected. Now we have blinker one blinker two. To blinker two, we're going to apply an effect to it. So we're going to open up our Windows panel, and we're going to find the effects and presets. And it opened up over here. I'm just going to move the dock the panel over here. And I've already searched for glow. So you can find glow here and I'm going to apply it or drag it onto blinker number two. Now you can see that something happened over. Now, I'm going to drag over this control panel just so we can see what's happening. And nope, it's all right. All right. So we have this object here, the blinker, and a glow has been applied to it. So there's a lot of different things that you can do with effects. So play around with it and just see what they can do. Maybe increase the glow radius, the glow intensity, make it brighter, glow threshold, see what that exactly does. Maybe I like that a little bit more, and that will be okay. So you can play around with everything to see what they do. But for this case, we're just going to have it like that. Now, we want to make this sort of blink in and out. Now, how we're going to do that is we're going to find the markers at which we want to animate it. We want to animate a full loop between these two key frames. So the first keyframe, I'm going to apply a marker. By clicking the Asterix on the number pad, you can apply a marker to either the layer or if I have no layers selected, let's just deselect all layers, and I hit the marker, it'll apply a marker to the top. That's what I'm going to do. Now, I know that this layer is 20 frames forward. So if I hold Shift page down and hit that twice, now it goes to the exact 20 frames, and I'm going to hit the asterix on my number pad and create another marker. If we don't have a number pad, you can go to layer markers and add a marker there. Now, between these two objects, I'm going to animate this Blink. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to animate the opacity. So I'm going to hit T on my keyboard with blinker two selected, and I'm going to start at the first keyframe with a property of 0%. Now I'm going to hit the stopwatch in that layer to make a key frames. Now I'm going to hold Shift page down to go ten frames over. Now, in the middle, this is where I want it to be at full opacity. So I'm going to hit 100%. And then all I'm going to do is go to the next one, shift page down, and I'm going to go back to 0%. Now you can see what's going to happen here. Now one blink. Now I can set it up as a loop. So I can alt click on that stopwatch, go loop out, hit Enter. And now what's going to happen is from the first keyframe to the last, it's going to keep blinking in and out. Now, that works pretty well, and I like that, but I want it to be more like a flash and fade. So instead of transitioning 0-100, I wanted to go only from zero and 100 here and then fade out. So how I'm going to do that is my first keyframe. I'm going to right click and I'm going to go toggle hold keyframe. Now, it's going to hold that value 0% up until it hits the next key frames, and then it's going to hit 100% immediately, and then it'll transition back down to 0%. And then it'll hold, and then it'll flash. So now, instead of doing smooth in and out, it'll be a flash then fade, flash, then fade. Boom, boom, boom. So if I zoom out, you can see exactly what's happening. Again, all of these effects are customizable. So if you wanted to reduce the opacity of that or the radius or the glow intensity, you can change that. Great. Alright, that's how we animate our blink. 6. Animating the Icons: The The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to animate this screen icons. All we're going to do is we're going to push them out a little bit and fade them 100-0% as they push out. So pretty simple. So we'll click on our screen icons, we'll open up the position property, hold Shift to open up a second property, Shift T to open up the opacity property. And now what we're going to do is we're going to set the two key frames. We're going to position it there. We're going to set the position and the opacity. Now we're going to move forward. To our marker, and now we're going to push it out, so we're just going to drag it out just a little bit, like that. And we're going to change the opacity to 0%. Alright, now let's see what that looks like. Cool. Alright, so that looks not too bad. We're going to play around with the speed a little bit. So I'm going to select all my key frames. I'm going to right click and go keyframe assistant and apply an Easy Ease. So that'll make it sort of go in slow slow. Now, to make this more apparent, I want it to start in really slow and then speed up as it gets to the end. So I'm going to open up my speed graph here, my graph editor. I'm going to make sure it's on speed graph. I'm going to select those two key frames, and I'm just going to pull this first one forward. And now it's going to start really slow and then speed up. And then I'm going to pull that one all the way to the end so it speeds right into the end. Like that. All right, I'm going to exit out of that, and we'll just see what that looks like. Boom. Boom. Okay? Not bad. Now, just like our other ones, we're going to loop these ones. So I'm going to hit Alt on my stopwatch, Alt click, and I'm going to type in loop out, hit Enter, click on my opacity, Al click on my opacity, Loop out, click, exit out of that, and we'll see how that looks. Maybe not the best. So maybe we do need to extend these a little bit more. So we're going to go shift page down, one, two. Let's see if that'll loop properly. Maybe it's got to go to zero a little earlier. Let's go to zero a little earlier. Changes to value graph. Good. Okay, I think that looks okay. So play around with those graphs settings to see if you can change anything, play around with them. Otherwise, just set it up as a straightforward movement and opacity. And yeah, just have some fun with it, see what you can do. Just go to save that. 7. Adjusting Your Composition: Okay. In this section, we're just going to create a new composition and maybe move things around, play around with it and see if we can make it a little differently. Okay, so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm just going to duplicate the transformation machine. I'm going to hit Control D, and I'll make a third one. So if I open up that one, we can play around with this one. I'm going to go to the composition settings, and I'm going to change the composition settings from 1920 by 13 50 by 1080 and 13 50. So it's a four by five ratio. And now you can see that fits in within my border that I made, and you can see how it looks now. That's really cool. All right. So let's save that. Now I have transformation three. We can hide that frame around the border or we can keep it there, change the color. I believe if you wanted to, you can change this. You can go create shapes from vector layer. And if you wanted to, you can increase the stroke width. And there you go. You got a cool little framed illustration with movement, which is really fun. Now, if I wanted to duplicate this whole object here, this whole animation, all I'll have to do is I'm going to duplicate it again. And as you can see, I'm making many duplicates just so I have different versions of them that I can go back to. Now, make sure I double click into the fourth one because any changes I made here won't be applied to the third one over here. Now, I'm going to see my frame here. I'm just going to lock that one because I don't want to move it. The frame, lock that. Blinker, I'm going to move this one in object. All these ones, I'm going to select now. So I'm going to select all these layers. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to precompose them into one layer. So I'm going to go precompose. Precompose one, I'll just say transform transform. Now I have this layer. Now, if I move it around, actually, before I do that. Let's reverse that because I need some extra layers. I need the actual machine. Let's see where the machine is. I need the machine and the shadow as well. I don't need the background though. So I'm going to select everything from here on, and I'm going to precompose those. So I'm going to go precompose transform, there we go. Now I can move that around anywhere and it keeps that. So I'm going to keep it there, and I'm going to duplicate this transform, Control D, and now I can move it somewhere else. So I have another machine. I'll put it down here. So I have two machines sort of working together. Where do I want it down here? Yeah, I can overlap it. And then I'll do another one, Control D, and then I'll move it up here, but I'll move this one to the bottom, so I'll just There you go. Over top, like that. And this one. Yeah, there we go. So now I have multiple machines working like that. Cool. So what I did is I took all the layers that encompass this one illustration and precompose them into one, and then I can duplicate them as many times as I wanted to. Just remember, this composition is only as big as this frame. So if I move it over this way, it's going to be cut off. So if I wanted to move it over more like that, I might have to do it from my original version that has the extension of it, and then I can move it a little more freely. All right. And if I wanted to, I can change the background color. Unlock, create shapes from vector layer. And now I can change that background layer to some other color green, green. 8. Exporting Your Project: The All right. Now that you created your animation illustration, we are going to export it. So all you got to do is with it selected, your transformation four or whatever composition you want, you just go to file. You're going to export and you're going to add it to Media Encoder. Okay, when it finally pops up, now what we can do, I like to change mine to animated gift just so I can submit it in the project panel, or you can change it to your h265, you can change it to, you know, QuickTime, whatever you'd like. But I'm going to use Animated GIF and the Animated GIF, Match Source. And you can select where you want your file to go to. I'm going to hit Play. Okay. And then we can go to our file and see it. There we go. And we have our animated gift. Looks great. Looks really cool. The amazing transformation machine. Awesome. 9. Thank you!: Hey, guys, I just want to say thank you for taking the class, and I really look forward to seeing what you guys create. If you create your own class project, submit it in the Project panel, and I'll go through it and I'll give you any feedback. If you enjoy the class, please consider leaving a short, positive review of the class. It helps engage more students like you to learn together. If you like learning with me, please consider checking out my profile here on Skillshare with an assortment of other classes and more Isometric move mini classes that you can create more class projects and get into it'll be After Effects. Thanks again for taking the class, and I really look forward to continuing with you on your creative journey. See you later.